Top 80 Fay Weldon Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “One can learn, at least. One can go on learning until the day one is cut off.”

— Fay Weldon

52. “Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.”

— Fay Weldon

53. “As it has turned out, the whole relationship between men, women and children has tilted, to the disadvantage of women.”

— Fay Weldon

54. “Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.”

— Fay Weldon

55. “Of course you have to believe in destiny; that everything is sheer chance is an intolerable notion.”

— Fay Weldon

56. “When today’s young woman says she isn’t a feminist what she means is she isn’t a lesbian and she doesn’t hate men, she likes to wear make-up and she enjoys a laugh. In which she is no different from many an early feminist.”

— Fay Weldon

57. “For that is what a child should be, and seldom is, the product of man and woman, of opposing natures, unified, however temporarily, by the amazing, circling, weaving dance of love and lust and God’s involvement in it.”

— Fay Weldon

58. “Style is what’s there when you look at someone’s writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.”

— Fay Weldon

59. “Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.”

— Fay Weldon

60. “Some women are born mothers, some women become mothers, and some have motherhood thrust upon them. I struggled against it all my life, but I think the truth is I was probably born to it. I don’t do badly, I don’t do well, I just do it.”

— Fay Weldon

61. “Better to live with the guilty secret than the open truth of their life together – that they were bound by the habit of illicit lust, mutual degradation.”

— Fay Weldon

62. “No one should be allowed to give back the gift of life, unless they are very old and full of tears, when the body outlives the spirit, when they should be allowed to join the others who’ve already gone.”

— Fay Weldon

63. “Pride is what you can afford or think you can afford.”

— Fay Weldon

64. “Food is the supremest of pleasures.”

— Fay Weldon

65. “If I am a prolific writer and turn my hand, with what seems to some as indecent haste, from novels to screenplays to stage and radio plays, it is because there is so much to be said, so few of us to say it, and time runs out.”

— Fay Weldon

66. “Prudence says one thing, desire says another, and I’d rather go with desire any time.”

— Fay Weldon

67. “I ran upstairs, loving, weeping. I will run downstairs, unloving, not weeping.”

— Fay Weldon

68. “If you love the father of your child you feel he has given enough. If you don’t love him all you want is his money.”

— Fay Weldon

69. “Marriage is what happens when one at least of the partners doesn’t want the other to get away.”

— Fay Weldon

70. “My experience of men in cars has always been that if you don’t want them to do something, they will. It is when they are behind a wheel that they most fear the control of women and children.”

— Fay Weldon

71. “Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living.”

— Fay Weldon

72. “Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.”

— Fay Weldon

73. “Some of us are made fat and some of us are made thin, and that’s all there is to it.”

— Fay Weldon

74. “She drank sweet coffee, sweet tea, sweet cocoa and sweet sherry.”

— Fay Weldon

75. “A ‘weakness,’ I now realize, is nothing but a strength not properly developed.”

— Fay Weldon

76. “Confidence is something one acquires. It can come early or late but it is impossible to write without it. Mine came late.”

— Fay Weldon

77. “Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would.”

— Fay Weldon

78. “I know that I’m a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone’s told me to.”

— Fay Weldon

79. “There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.”

— Fay Weldon

80. “The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.”

— Fay Weldon

81. “One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods.”

— Fay Weldon

82. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some toast, Phyllis? Toast is one of the triumphs of our civilisation. It must be made with very fresh bread, thickly cut; then toasted very quickly and buttered at once, so the butter is half-melted. Unsalted butter, of course; you sprinkle it with salt afterwards. Sea salt, preferably.”

— Fay Weldon

83. “Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually.”

— Fay Weldon

84. “There was no such thing as defeat if you didn’t accept it.”

— Fay Weldon

85. “During the day she would read science fiction novels. In the evenings she watched television. And she ate, and ate, and drank, and ate.”

— Fay Weldon

86. “Loving is upsetting. That’s the point of it.”

— Fay Weldon

87. “Nowadays most people wear black most of the time anyway: go to a literary party and one would imagine everyone there was in perpetual mourning for their lives.”

— Fay Weldon

88. “Ruby once told Margaret that Ben was an accident, but it wasn’t true. The house just felt empty without a baby in it. Good God, why do women have such feelings: and worse, having them, why do they then act upon them?”

— Fay Weldon

89. “For who ever lived totally as they wanted to; who ever, if they have time to think about it, dies wholly satisfied? And those who remain know it.”

— Fay Weldon